


Rage

by Argyle (boksoongah)



Category: Warframe
Genre: Spoilers, guess we'll find out, i don't know where i'm going with this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:47:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22733539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boksoongah/pseuds/Argyle
Summary: [WORK CONTAINS SPOILERS] If there's one thing Valkyr knows, it's rage.
Kudos: 10





	Rage

Rage.

A curious thing, this: they say there’s no such thing as perpetual energy, motion without die-off. Yet rage, and rage alone, of all things in this strange, vast universe, can keep a being going long after they should have fallen still.

I should know. Rage is what I know best, after all. My story begins with it, and ends with it, and is made of it; and it is the story I will tell now.

I won’t begin at the beginning. I can’t. I don’t remember my birth. But I know that when I was barely old enough to know my own name, I was already on a ship to another star, far away from wherever my birth must have happened. I remember wondering if that’s where I’d left my home. It took me a little while more to realize I never had a home.

I can’t begin at the beginning otherwise because that isn’t how my world is made - with something I can point to and say, “It started there,” and something else I can point to that followed, and something that followed that and so on and so on. A line has a beginning and an end and all the in-betweens like that. My story is not a line. My story is broken glass-shards of a mirror, the one the man I met in the veil looks into, and he sees me there, whole, I suppose, for his eyes are clear enough to make sense from the pieces; but my eyes are not, for I’m blinded by the veil, on the other side of it, and besides, I am far too angry to see more than red, unless I try.

So that is why my story begins only with rage; and ends with rage; and everything in between, the madness that clings to this rage, is all I have left.

In-between comes in flashes. I remember:

Somewhere cold and very bright. There is light in my eyes, too much to make out from where it comes. I flinch back. I try to squeeze my eyes shut. They will not go.

“She’s awake,” says a voice I do not know. The lights flicker. They change color, but do not relent. I open my mouth to scream. Nothing comes out.

I am trapped.

I am furious.

There is an escape.

I remember:

Soft flesh is no match for my steel-bright talons. I sink into skin and muscle and bone, again and again and again. I revel in the hot, thick taste of blood; I roll, over my teeth, the perfume of dead and dying things. I still cannot scream; no matter. The alarms scream for me. My victims do not. They are already dead. I’ve torn out their throats.

I remember:

A ship. More lights, these soft, not so bright. Someone is carrying me. I know this is a ship because I have seen it before. I do not know how.

I am set down before a dais, where I look up, and see me, but not me. Smaller somehow. Weak. I have no steel flesh, no diamond-hard skin, no talons with which to rend and shred and kill, no claws with which to leap from body to body. I have...eyes, two, tiny, and hair, and delicate hands, and fragile legs. I blink back at myself and do not understand.

“You are safe now, my child,” says a voice I remember, but can’t name.

I watch myself, my useless, seated self, open my mouth.

I scream.

-

I remember the name of the man, now, who hurt me.

His name need not be mentioned here - I won’t utter such a vile thing here - he will never be named again. He is dead. I killed him.

I do not know if that’s true. But with the rage that comes at the thought of this, I am sure I must have, somehow.

I will describe him instead. He was short and ugly, puny, easy kill-meat for my talons. But he took my talons from me. He bound me in a place I should not have been kept.

I remember how he pushed and prodded and lifted my hands and twisted my feet, my proud limbs, not that weak sniveling little creature on the dais but me, myself, as I truly am. My beautiful, strong body. And he had it bound - and kept - in that place - like something shoved into a dark corner for storage and left to rot.

Only he didn’t leave me to rot. And it was hardly dark.

He wanted me to take me apart, didn’t he? I remember he called me something - empty, he said. He said he had looked inside me and I was empty. That didn’t make sense to him.

I remember the pain when he did that.

I don’t know how he opened me. How he got inside me. I am solid, untouchable, a forest of steel sinew and unyielding metal muscles and bones made of things no creature could dream of breaking.

And my skin, which could not be torn -

My skin.

He took it.

I remember screaming on the dais, me and not-me, me and also-me, me on the dais, me on the ground, me looking at me, me staring back, and the voice, this other voice, the kind, soft one, saying -

“He has left wounds on you, my angel. They will take a long time to heal. I’ll stay with you until they have finished.”

I was still screaming.

-

I remember -

I was not alone, in the times between when I was kept awake, by that man, in that place, and when I was hurting. No one was there with me. But I was not alone.

I was in darkness, a darkness so complete that I think I forgot the light. I forgot the pain, the searching fingers, the seeking eyes. My skin, I remembered, was in front of me, somehow; I could see it stretched out in strips and pieces, and lights being run over it, and there was a hum that matched the murderous rage that thrummed through my body - the rest of my body, what had not been taken - with every beat of my furious heart. I wanted him, I remembered; I wanted his skin.

But in the darkness all that vanished. It came quickly, too, this darkness. One breath filled me with rage. The next, I was gone.

In this darkness, I heard a voice, a third one:

“Took you long enough, kiddo.”

I was not alone.

I know on the ship - long ago, years and years and decades and centuries, or maybe minutes or seconds, ago - that I had no parents. They weren’t with me there. I had something like them, though.

I remember processing time, a very boring spell in some blank white place where one of the box-face men, the one the gods called Corpus, spoke for a very long time, and said words I didn’t know or care about; and when they were done, I walked out between a man and a woman, and they looked not so unlike me. But they were not my parents.

The ritual was to make them like my parents. The ritual was to promise the Corpus men, and our gods to whom they answered, that they would act like my parents, and care for me as though they were my parents, so I could go on that ship, the ill-fated journey; I could only go if I went with someone like my parents. But they were not my parents. They were only there out of the kindness of their hearts. They could have left whenever they liked.

I remember they told me this many times. I remember they reminded me of this each time I cried or said I was afraid or whenever I was angry.

I am angry.

-

These people on the ship, my not-parents, were always with me. But I was alone.

Here, in this darkness, in this void space, I am not alone.

The voice speaks. It says:

“Remember me, kiddo?”

I do not know.

“You’ve still got a long way to go.”

**Author's Note:**

> I (admittedly a filthy Valkyr main) have always wondered how it might have felt to be her. So many years of torture at Salad's ugly lettuce hand can't have been fun. Mostly what we know about her on a personal level is just that she's unreasonably, murderously angry and clearly not stable, and that resonates with me on a deep level.
> 
> \- "Why do you specifically say she's unable to scream while she's being tortured? That b!tch yells all the damn time in-game." Don't worry, the glorious screeching will arrive later. I have my reasons, I promise.
> 
> I'm also doing this to try and get back into writing since I love it and haven't done much since starting college. We'll see how that goes.


End file.
